Luke had to struggle? In the span of the first film, Luke went from being a frankly mediocre shot (womp rats are massive, shooting one isn't impressive) with inflated opinions about his skill as a pilot, and an entirely untrained and untalented Jedi to landing an impossible shot blind, after a lifetime of nothing but moisture farming under the protection of one of the greatest Jedi knights.

Luke is a major Gary Sue.

Now that they have "destroyed" the Jedi order I really hope they explore some of the other force traditions.  As a kid I loved the Jedi but as I grew older I began to realize that they were pretty much just as bad as the Sith (just in a different way).  When I discovered there were other force traditions the Jedi/Sith wars really began to seem less and less interesting to me.

In reply to PCO.Spvnky (msg # 15):

Yeah, and all the other force traditions are so incredibly cool.

In reply to dparasol (msg # 14):

I can excuse stuff like that.  If you consider the Force as some kind of extra-sentient entity, it knows what its students need to grow.  The Force needed someone to pull off that one-of-a-kind shot...and Luke was the only one willing to listen to it instead of a targeting computer (that was apparently never calibrated for a shot to make a 90deg turn just before the target, oddly enough.  See, the thing that always bothered me about the Death Star attack run was why fly down the trench?  Locate the port and attack from overhead...a diving target is harder to lock onto, anyway, because the angle of the barrel is constantly changing...you've got two axes you have to get just right to hit the target, instead of just one...and if you were diving at a port that opens down into the station, you wouldn't have had that 'just impacted on the surface' nonsense...a hit would have been a hit...)

But once Luke got that far, he had to overcome his preconceptions of what a Jedi should be, and develop some humility to learn properly.  So, yeah...he had to struggle.

Now, Rey...her whole life has been a struggle.  She's learned humility.  She's been living on instinct (and potentially listening to The Force) since she was tiny.  So, mentally and emotionally, she's ready to carry a burden which Luke had to be softened up to carry.  I can forgive that.

The hyperspace ram maneuver is just one of an abundance of things about the sequels that I blame JJ Abrams for, because he did the same thing with his Star Trek movies...'this threat has gotta be bigger and badder than anything we've ever seen before...screw plausibility, I want the worst threat we can create!'  So, in Star Trek, you get things like a mining ship that has somehow inexplicably developed enough military capabilities to lay waste to an entire battle-fleet of combat vessels with experienced crews aboard, or a secretly-built starship that is so much larger than anything else in its fleet that one wonders just how they managed to smuggle all the necessary parts for the superstructure out into the middle of nowhere, with nobody noticing, and starships with absolutely needless construction elements in them.  In Star Wars, you get planets that somehow maintain their integrity and climate while being gutted and repurposed...weapons that can somehow siphon energy away from the sun that is the gravitational center of the star system, pull it in through the atmosphere without instantly igniting all the oxygen in the air and any flammable substances (like the trees) one the ground, and redirecting it into an energy-beam that fires from a single source, and then mysteriously splits at some point into multiple beams that wipe out entire star systems.  I don't hate the story around it...but that makes parts of that story hard to accept.  Had similar issues with Star Destroyers that somehow managed to harness the same level of energy for which the Empire had to build entire Death Stars, when a smaller, simpler kind of weapon (that ignites the atmosphere, instead of destroying the entire planet) would be just as effective and far more plausible.

All that said, I don't hate the stories around those points.  I feel like there was a lot of good.  Ep 7 mirroring Ep 4 makes sense to me because it echoes the cyclic nature of many of humanity's myths, where a threat is overcome by a hero or demigod or god, only to have another similar threat arise later and have to be handled again.  They just flipped the script slightly and had an ideological successor do it, rather than the same hero.  I do think they dropped the ball in not establishing a definite story arc for the entire trilogy from the off, which was one of the things that George Lucas definitely got right and why the original trilogy feels complete and unified, despite the fact that each episode had different writers and a different director overseeing it.  Yes, the sequels were a bit of a mess, story-wise...part of that is due to Colin Treverow walking away (or being fired, depending on who tells the story), part of it is due to Carrie Fisher dying, and a lot of it is due to just having some vague direction in which to take the story and having different people piecing together the route along the way...it'd be like trying to find your way west in North America with partial maps from Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson, and the Donner Party.  Yeah, you'd eventually get to the Pacific Ocean, but there would be a lot of gaps along the way.  I like where they ended up...I don't think it was perfect, but I think it was fitting.  I have some issues with the route, and a few of the detours...but overall, I enjoyed it, and it gave me a side of Star Wars that I have only explored in some role-playing games...where the hero grows disenchanted with his role and questions whether he's done more harm than good...where literally anybody can wind up becoming a hero, regardless of their upbringing or bloodline (aiming that one at Finn)...where the good guys literally lose almost everything and STILL manage to pull it all together when it counts.

Those plot points are what I love about the sequel trilogy...and I feel like anyone trying to retcon them is going to gut them and give a hollowed-out facsimile that lacks the heart of the first attempt.

I find it easy to imagine Luke suffering from PTSD.  His first experience pilotting a starfighter, and he kills thousands of people with one shot.  He had to feel that in the Force, though he may not have realized it at first.  He spends years learning to be a Jedi, and fighting against Imperial remnants, as well as Sith, Dark Jedi, others, in his quest to find more information on the Jedi.  Then, his own nephew, and a small group of his... friends, kill every one of his Jedi-in-Training, because Luke could not end his budding evil; feeling reaponsible for all of the suffering caused by Ben Solo's/Kylo Ren's fall to the Darkside and subsequent evil.  I can see why he left and closed himself off to the Force.
And, when he used the Projection power, he had not used his force abilities in a long time.  While his skill remained, his capability had atrophied some, and using that much Force power eventually killed him.

I read the article. It looks like a classic conspiracy theory penned by an anonymous author with no corroborating evidence. When respected journalists and sources start discussing it seriously I will be more interested, until then it is nothing more than the ramblings of an idiot.

Exactly.  They made movies, they should just own their mistakes and move on.  Very casually never, ever, ever again even think about "hyperspace ramming" and pretend Rian never made that colossal error and eventually people will get over it.

I mean the Trekkies get over similar nonsense all the time...  (SHOTS FIRED!  SHOTS FIRED!  :P)




I agree.  Luke and his fall and mini redemption is the one thing I actually liked about The Last Jedi, the only thing I feel Rian did right.  The rest of the moving is wet garbage fire, but that part was really done well.  It's the tiny diamond in the pile of [EXPLICATIVE DELETED].

It is completely uncorroborated but this is also a site that has been the source of leaks proven to be true in the past so /shrug.

I am in big favor of the sequel trilogy being wiped out. As individual movies, the sequel movies aren't terrible but as capstones to one of the largest sci-fi series they are awful. The first movie is just a rehash of A New Hope, the second movie spends half its time undoing the first movie and the third movie spends half its time pretending the second doesn't exist. Again, individual movies are perfectly fine but taken as a whole trilogy it falls flat and as a capstone to a franchise it is a complete bungle.

While the movies were successful there is a clear decline in quality reflected in the box office. Force Awakens had a box office of $2 billion while TLJ dropped to about $1.2 and ROS is sitting at about $1 billion. Having a trilogy lose half its revenue means it was a failure in Disney's eyes.

Now enter Jon Faverau of Marvel fame. Under his leadership they took a series that hit $1 billion all the way up to nearly $3 billion for Endgame. Now the Mandalorian is a huge driver behind Disney's new streaming service and Disney could be realizing that maybe they shouldn't have given one of their most valuable IPs over to JJ Abrams as a vanity project (he agreed to direct so long as he also got to write it) or Rian Johnson who had zero experience on large blockbusters (TLJ had a budget of about x10 any movie Johnson had made previously.)

What studios keep bungling when they look at the Marvel formula is that Marvel movies are very formulaic and have a very strong vision of what needs to be delivered and where the movie needs to go because Infinity/Endgmae have been on the plans since Day 1. You CAN get away with handing a film over to a relatively inexperienced director if you give them a solid writing team, a strong support network, and pre-established outline to build off of.

Star Wars had none of that. JJ Abramas only wrote the first movie and reportedly when he turned it over to Rian, he had no notes about any of the threads carried over. There was no vision at all. Abrams hadn't answered any of the questions OR Rian Johnson trashed it all. I don't recall which but the point is the reason why TLJ trashes all of the big mysteries (Rey's lineage, why did Luke disappear, why did Ben turn to the darkside, who is Snoake) and just goes in a different direction. Then when it was given back to Abrams he spent half the runtime digging those mysteries out of the trash. Suddenly Rey's lineage was important. Suddenly Snoake's background was important.

Ultimately I think it's going to be a big black eye for Disney but Disney has always been willing to take a hit for long term gains. The recent batch of movies, across the board, have been failures compared to what Star Wars could have done. With competent storytelling they should be hitting Marvel numbers and they missed that mark completely so why not try again? This time handing it over to one of the minds behind Marvel's success to set up another IP to be an absolute beast in the industry.

As someone who spent years and years consuming Star Wars and Game of Thrones lore, it has become incredibly clear to me how quickly an awful ending can ruin my interest in a franchise.

And I know it's popular to suggest that no ending would satisfy "fans", but it's simply not true. Media is fluid, most people understand that, and change is not the issue here. These properties stumbled because they lacked vision. I'm not disputing that some people still enjoyed them, but there are enough examples of other works ending their runs just fine, without much controversy, even ones they don't 'stick the landing', which are still well-received by their fans in retrospect.

I would absolutely welcome a rehash of the latest Star Wars movies under different leadership, but it's simply not going to happen.

And on a more personal note: JJ Abrams is a fine cinematographer and producer, but I have yet to watch a movie he wrote/directed that wasn't a shallow mess. Even the first Nu-Trek movie, for as fun as it is moment-to-moment, was pretty hollow and derivative. The man is really good at building impressive sand castles, but he's terrible at constructing anything more solid.

I wouldn't mind them terminating the sequelogy. From those movies there was only one thing I liked, Rey's lightsaber because it had that twist motion to turn on and had a yellow blade instead of the usual green or blue for Jedi.

The rest of it was okay at best. Prequelogy was way better.

The only Star Wars stuff Disney put out that I really enjoyed was Rogue One, the cartoons (not counting Resistance), and Mandalorian.
This message was last edited by the user at 13:54, Tue 07 July 2020.

The one thing that these movies have proved is that Star Wars fans are (in general) petulant, spoiled brats.  Many of them have proven that they will never be happy with any new movie, ever.  They actually made me embarrassed to be a Star Wars fan.  The trilogy weren't the best Star Wars movies but they were far better than episode 2 or 3 imo. Yet the "fans" tanked Solo, didn't even give it a chance, and it is one of my favorites now.  Rogue One was also amazing but everyone is too busy focused on whining to notice that.  Disney is in the unenviable position of having to try to placate a bunch of old fans and try to attract a bunch of new fans (and neither of those fan bases like the same things). If the "fans" don't stop being such garbage people I imagine the Star Wars franchise is just going to die out.  I would much rather have it die than have its memory tarnished by a bunch of bullying whiners though.

In reply to PCO.Spvnky (msg # 24):

This take is so needlessly antagonistic and broad. Defend elements of the films, attack elements of the films, talk about the screenplay or the other elements of what made them, but attacking the "fans" just isn't useful.

I mean, you yourself are a fan by your own admission. Stop engaging in the very same vitriol that you accuse others of engaging in.

Also, the reception and near-universal praise of Mandalorian and other recent Star Wars media sort of proves that it isn't about the "fans", it's about the individual works and their merits.

Me thinks PCO.Spvnky doth protest to much.

The problem with Solo was they spent to much time trying to establish every little detail about Han

Elements of his character were treated as something special that had to absolutely be shown with reverence how he got them. Solo just couldn't be his last name, he had to be given it by someone with an explaination as to why. His blaster couldn't just be any random blaster it had to be shown he was given it making it important to him in some meaningful emotional sentimental way.

Cut out all that crap, it becomes a decent movie not as good as Rogue One but still pretty good. That stuff imo should have been shot but relegated to the deleted scenes on the home media release.

In reply to Harley Quinn (msg # 26):

Yeah, I enjoyed Solo at the time, and didn't even mind the individual elements that most people dislike... but I haven't watched it since it was released. I didn't walk away from it feeling like it added anything captivating enough for me to want to go back to it.

I've gone back to Rogue One multiple times though, despite it's own flaws. The same with the prequels.

And, see...I haven't been able to bring myself to rewatch the prequels since they were in the theater.  Moments of great story-telling wrapped in layers of directorial self-indulgence and arbitrary plot details that just obscured the story.  If I could pick a trilogy to have worked over by someone else, it would be those.

I really enjoyed Rogue One.  Stylistically, it's very different from what came before it, but I feel like they did a really good job of extrapolating details from what we already had.  I enjoyed Solo, but didn't love it...another case of plot contrivances getting in the way of what might otherwise have been a solid story (and I'll admit it...I was hoping for something more distinctive than a retread of the 'street-orphan makes it big' trope for a background, but I'll concede that it works.)  I would rather watch Solo than any of the prequel trilogy, though.  I know some people really like the prequels, but I have a hard time seeing them as anything more than George Lucas letting his ego overwhelm the story.

In reply to Carakav (msg # 27):

Solo's actually the only one of the recently-made films that I've /wanted/ to watch more than once. I haven't yet, because I simply haven't had the time, but it's sitting in my watchlist and will probably eventually be one I purchase just to be sure it's available in my library forever. I can't say that about any of the others - heck, I've not even /watched/ the last two movies, and I'm not sure I will. For a long time, I was really proud of my record of having seen all of the Star Wars films first-run in the theatre, but after Force Awakens I just couldn't bring myself to care anymore.

I did watch Rogue One, not in the theatre, and went back to the theatre to see Solo because Han's my favorite and always has been, but the other two... the best I can give them is a strong 'meh'. What they did to Force Awakens was just too egregious for me to overlook.

Tell that to the near universal appraise the Mandalorian is getting. Is it that outrageous that fans would want high quality material be produced for the things they love? Or should everyone just shut and accept whatever slop is shoveled out in front of us?

I am going to have to agree with PCO.Spvnky on this.  There are a lot of people who bad mouth the movies, as opposed to just learning how to enjoy watching someone else's vision come to pass.  Instead, they complain about spending $12 or $13 to watch and complain about something that someone else spent millions to bring to life.
Mind you, it isn't everyone, but there is a subsection who claim to be fans but seem to want to tear it all apart.  And, I find that so sad.  It's okay to not like a movie, or a character.  That's all well and good.  But to tear into and bully an actor so rabidly on social media that they delete their account?  That is unacceptable.  And it's not a very large group of people, but they are so very vocal.  It makes me wonder if there is a specific group that are some kind of professional troll, going around bashing everyone and everything

You can claim that this is just a small vocal minority but bottom line Disney cares about $$$ and Rise of Skywalker took in half of what Force Awakens did. The interest in Star Wars is there based on the $2B FA did but it has shown a steady decline:

Box Office Returns:


For comparison



When one of their flagship properties' main series is struggling to beat shot-for-shot remake cash grabs of old products one has to wonder about it. That $2B for Force Awakens showed Disney the potential fanbase and as each successive movie has come out it has gone down and down and down to the point where SOlo was a box office bomb which was previously unthinkable to do for an IP like Star Wars in the hands of a company that has a strong track record like Disney.

I'm not saying it has to happen but if I was Disney, I would be furious with how Star Wars has been managed and I'd be looking at bringing over some of that Marvel Magic into Star Wars. Nobody knows if Marvel will ever be able to build itself back to Endgame levels and there is always the chance that peoples interests change and the age of the Superhero Movie goes the way of the Western. Of course Disney wants Star Wars built into a strong IP because Disney understands that you don't have to be amazing, but you just have to be decent and reliable to keep it going.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:27, Tue 07 July 2020.

In reply to Harley Quinn (msg # 26):

I enjoyed Solo myself, it was a "fun" movie rather than something I saw a earthshaking.  Rogue One was also an enjoyable experience.

In reply to praguepride (msg # 32):

Those numbers don't tell the whole story, though.  I know, for instance, several people who refused to settle because they were disappointed with TFA.  Their frustration with one movie killed their interesting seeing anything else Star-Wars-related until The Mandalorian came along.

It also doesn't indicate how much of the drop-off, especially for Solo, was because it was "a bad movie" versus the tremendous amount of bad press and social media feedback broke about it before it ever even got to the theater.  There were very vocal factions that declared a boycott on it before we even saw trailers for it.  Replacing the sequel trilogy won't solve that problem.  People who have given up on the Skywalker Saga aren't likely to come back for a revised trilogy...they've already closed that book and put it on the shelf.  People who an avowed hatred for anything post Ep6 are highly unlikely to give a new trilogy another shot.  Erasing and remaking the sequels would be a HUGE gamble to appease fans that have been openly hostile about every move Disney's made with the franchise, and are unlikely to be any better about any new endeavors.

The smart money is to move on.  Develop The Mandalorian.  Flesh out a Star Wars universe that doesn't revolve around people named Skywalker.

I find it hard to put any plausibility in the notion that they'd try and erase what were still successful films, even if they aren't topping the box office tallies, when Disney has who-knows-how-many direct-to-video sequels out there.  They obviously don't expect every property to bring in billions at the box office, and if they aren't going back and fixing things like the video-only Aladdin sequels, I really don't see them putting the effort into a trio of Star Wars movies that were still at least modestly successful.  Disney isn't a "go back and fix the past" kind of company...they're more of a "well, let's not do that again, but move on" business.  They've had a lot of missteps, more than enough to not care about even a significant hiccup in one franchise.  They'll figure out what they think went wrong, and then incorporate that knowledge going forward.

I would like to see a modern remake of Disney's The Black Hole.  That film was their attempt at their own version of Star Wars back in 1978 or 79.  I loved, thought it had a lot of promise.  Still do.

That would be pretty awesome.  That was a disturbing, really good sci-fi story, when Disney started getting away from pretty fairy-tale stories and started to explore some darker material.  And, hey, it's been forty-ish years...that's old enough to be a solid prospect for a remake.

I just read an article interviewing the director and some of the actors, from last December, and there was mention of a remake in the planning stages, but, then Disney acquired Lucasfilm....

https://www.hollywoodreporter....st-star-wars-1262526

/eye's narrow.  Checks the calendar in case it's the end of times...

We agree.  Granted, I rate TLJ higher than TFA and I've not seen TRS... and actively enjoy Rogue One and Solo.  But we do agree, fans are not beholden to the creators (neither are creators beholden to fans... but without fans creators go broke).